


Folksaga

by AnonLady



Series: Folksagor [1]
Category: Midsommar (2019)
Genre: F/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-12
Updated: 2021-01-12
Packaged: 2021-03-16 11:21:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28705845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnonLady/pseuds/AnonLady
Summary: A smutty, post-canon, body horror fairytale AU. Folksaga means "fairytale" in Swedish. <3
Relationships: Dani Ardor/Pelle (Midsommar)
Series: Folksagor [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2104272
Kudos: 52





	Folksaga

Dani left the sketch he gave her behind, unfolded, backwards and upside-down, tucked into the tidily-made twin bed they meant for her. A very refined _fuck you,_ she thought. This was a contract and she did not read the terms; this was a spell when she did not know magic existed; this was a wish when she never believed wishes came true.

Her quick, furtive steps pound a tattoo through the packed dirt and dry yellow grass of the main village yards, the morning at her back burning her a white halo as she charges toward a different sun. No one braided her flaxen hair this morning; she’s half her old self in her hasty ponytail bun, despite her dress, their dress, in solstice blue and white. She lashes herself forward with furious thoughts. _I renounce you. I renounce this family. I renounce your goddess, especially if it’s me._

Before she slid the drawing under her covers, cool and soft in their shades of wheat stalks and cornflower blooms, the creamy weight of it paused her. She passed speculative fingers over the enigmatic _Mona Lisa_ smile he had given her, smearing the pencil imperceptibly. The oils of the May Queen’s flesh mingling with his imagination might strengthen the spell, she thinks, and the spell was already so powerful. She was so happy to be remembered, so surprised to be adored.

Actually, she still is. 

How long did this take him? When did he start? Are there others that weren’t fine enough to give her, or was it perfect, destined from the first stroke? Did he draw from memory or collect her picture from a million covert glances or simply draft what he saw in a dream? On her birthday, it was ready and he was ready and he was only waiting for her to be ready, feeding her dreams and beliefs as with an eyedropper. _Poor kitty, poor abandoned love, take this until you’re strong enough to take me._

She is half-afraid, though she knows better, that her acceptance of it in the first place was what doomed them. She didn’t know. She would swear. She didn’t know.

What she does know, now, is that however hard her heart beats, however the paper Queen trembles in her hands, she cannot keep it.

Keeping it is consent. 

She did not consent. She does not consent. He cannot decide that for her. That’s why he had to pretend -- Did he pretend? -- that it was a gift, not a proposal.

_Is a proposal not a gift? His heart in a box._

Five days since she coughed out the ash from her maniac grin, and though they believe in the wholesomeness of constructive action and labor to soothe the disordered mind, the family is easing her into their rhythms. No chore assignments for the Queen. In her spare morning alone time, alone as she can be here, where smiles flit over her shoulder like dust motes in a sunbeam, Dani uncreased the paper Queen open and tucked her in. Living or dead, she’ll never be her again.

She must pass back through the gate. The gate is a sunburst. The gate is a vagina. She doesn’t have the anthropological foundation of (dead) Christian and (dead) Josh, but like the sketch, she recognized the sign without seeing the meaning. 

Once, she had an English teacher who would stand at the whiteboard and scorn all the timid silence after she posed the class a question. “Is it more tragic or less tragic that Heracles never really had a choice?” she asked, scanning the rows of faces for even a flicker of opinion. Dani had her own opinion, as good as anyone’s, but she couldn’t break the silence; the silence silenced her, and the teacher despaired of her with all the rest. “Did you read it," she hectored, "or did you just look at the words?” Hands on hips that never broadened or broke to admit passage for a child, that teacher never _just_ looked at a word in her life.

How do you lie to people who lie to themselves as much as she did, as much as Christian did, as much as Josh and Mark did? Tell them the truth. Sometimes things actually mean what they mean.

The gate may never let her home, but it will at least let her _away._ She does not _consent._

The family trusts her need for them though. She didn’t try to run after they shucked her out of her magnificent May Queen garment, the strange, gasping birth of a slick, flushed, sweating woman from the prodding womb of every sticker-fingered and woody-stemmed bloom in Hälsingland, including ones only the Hårgans know how to cultivate. Excellent midwives, the Hårgan women, excellent cultivators. They coaxed her, naked and pink, crying and laughing, back into the world. Instead of afterbirth, she trailed vines and leaves and petals, a second skin crushed into her perspiration, making her smell raw green and cloying sweet.

While the bitterness of burning clung to the air outside, like fire was a kind of weather, her new sisters bore her into a luxurious bath. At least luxurious in the terms of the rustic and slightly occult brand of comfort they offer here, beneficium, not decadence. A giant wooden tub waited for her in a private (except for seven handmaiden sisters, of course) cabin, its steaming, soap-greyed water topped with bubbles. They sponged scratches left by her raiment and her own short, unpainted fingernails, sopped clean the sugared silt of pollen all over her body, cooing along with her hisses, her sucked breath, her unvoiced sobs. 

Somehow blossoms became trapped in the folds of her sex, too. Her head lolling on the rim of the tub, she let them touch her everywhere, barely noticing, until their investigations focused on _there_ and _there._ A slight urge of her knees apart and, confused but pliant, she spreads wide for them in darkening water, creasing her stomach like the paper Queen to rise up and see what they’re doing. Delicate wet fingers withdraw delicate wet petals for what seems like a long time. She can’t imagine how they all got inside her, where they’re all coming from. It’s like a magic trick, and she’s not sure they really finish or just give up. With the shimmering water wearing a multicolored cape of these castoff petals, the bath looks more luxurious when she steps out than when she was lowered in.

Pelle’s companionship remains as steadfast and undemanding after the fire as before. No one says, least of all him, but she knows what she is meant for. It is like the Ättestupa perhaps; he is not preparing her, trusting that she will, in the crucial, final moment, be better served by shock than dread. Only this time, when he comforts her, maybe he won't stop at taking her hand in his.

For now though, he will and does, reliably. He is sunny and calm and calming, although she _knows_ now, she knows his crown stays with him in a way hers does not and she knows the sweet face and gentle manner will fall away before the green crown ever does. But this is all her expectation, nothing he has said, nothing he has done. (Yet. _Yet_ swells around them every moment.) They might be going to live a chaste, companionate existence, eating berries they gather and honey from their own hives and fruit fallen from trees, lying sinless next to each other on crisp sheets like asexual children. Expectation does not flaw his brow, does not darken the horizons in his eyes. 

What darkens with expectation is warm between her legs, in her tight-knotted stomach, in her fluttering heart as soon as he is close enough to remind her of _yet_ , and that is part of why she needs to run. If she stays, she will get everything she wished for, and she will have no choice. 

“Does he feel like home to you?” She took his point and she took his gift, another proposal, the sachet with the woody, narcotic fragrance that will always remind her of his hand on hers, and she made another contract. She promised him, although she did not know that was what he was offering.

The dance competition was a lottery, she tells herself, not destiny, certainly nothing to do with love. She tumbled inside a machine of flesh and linen and light and flowers. The machine was running and running, jostling her against the others. It was like the machine the Elders used during the Fire Temple ceremony, the one with the little wooden balls, each ball inscribed with a rune, and her ball, her rune, her chance is the one that jolted first and last into the looping wire chute. She was the one chosen for this sacrifice. And not Grandfather Arne but Pelle catches her, reads her, calls her. He alone says her name. She notices that, then and now. 

When she was crowned, he towered over her with so much love, she couldn’t see anything else. The kiss pulled her off her feet and pushed her back onto her heels with such force, part of her will never be torn from the moment. He extracted her promise then, too, although she didn’t know that was what it meant.

But for all those promises he tricked from her, when he comes to her now, deep in the twilight that passes for night during Midsommar, it isn’t to make love to her, but to tell her stories. Only he could make children’s stories feel like sex; she supposes it is another way of taking him inside herself.

“Can’t you sleep?” He massages her consciousness to comforted grey with every terrible Hårgan child’s fable -- no one ever lives, although they always _transcend_ \-- stroking her with that gossamer voice until sleep is irresistible, at least the second-most irresistible thing in her bed. 

Towards the middle of a story, he will be bold enough to comb her hair with his fingers, petting her lightly, fondly, and though he raises gooseflesh and a wet seam between her legs, though her nipples ache hard under her nightgown and once, she blushes to remember, she even twisted free of her bedsheet and looked up at him, as though she wanted to see him, but really, she only wanted him to see. Her chest was pink and heaving and the gown gathered naturally like a curtain between her thighs.

Kindness vibrates deep in his blue eyes. Shock will serve her better than dread.

Most mornings, he will follow her to the lake or to the edge of the woods, to the cookhouse, the gardens. He loves showing her around, telling her stories, explaining how they live. _Loves it._ His earnestness woos her in ways she doesn’t expect, and soon her eyelids want to drift to drowsy half-masts in the unblinking white sunlight. She wants to lie down in the tangled fields of wildflowers and be taken, by the wind and the rain or storms or by his wet soft mouth. It doesn't happen. Yet. Yet stretches as far as she can see.

Yet this morning, the ninth morning, the last day of Midsommar, she wakes alone. No Pelle beaming expectantly (of course he watches her sleep but she has never seen him sleep, not once) from his own bed. No women fussing over the baby. And she knew. Today is the day because tonight is the night. She can’t spare the time to pack or to shower. The window opens for this golden hour and no longer. Run while you can, Dani Ardor, in the last hours while that is still truly your name. Run before you consent.

She roots in her foot locker for her old clothes, the clothes she came with, but they’re gone now. They’ve taken them. No one asked, no one said, but no one asked either as the men she came with disappeared, did they? It would be too conspicuous to go out in them anyway. But it would be another refined _fuck you,_ even if (when) the worst happens and that’s how they find her body.

The yellow gate is unguarded. It never has been _guarded_ , but so many people, so busy every waking hour, they set a subtle screen of paths she must cross. And the smiles appear at her shoulder if she even looks at the gate too long, with a glass, a cake, a mug, a game, a question, a tender touch. Or Pelle’s mild voice brushes her nape and makes her shiver. “Dani? I have something else to show you.”

Not today. The ninth day, the ninth night. Where is everyone? She surprises herself by honestly wanting to go looking for them when this is her only chance to _escape_ them. 

_Where is he?_

Something should happen when she walks back through the gate. The earth should fissure, the sun should blacken with an eclipse, the village itself should waver and disappear, its magic undone. None of that. Dani charges through the gate and then, disappointed or unbelieving, turns back, goes through again. Again. For one comic moment, she hangs half in and half out, her legs in the woods, her torso leaning back for a last look at the cloudless blue summer in Hårga. There’s no sky in the forest, and the forest may go on forever, or for at least for as much time as her unsheltered, unfed, unwatered body can hold, if it comes to that. Her effective forever.

She should have been more patient for the magic, she realizes, only a little way down the forest's throat. The air changes first, fattening itself, sticky, sap sweet, pine needle pricked, more humid than in the village, as though from close breath at her shoulder. The scent of the farm -- browning dough on the hearthfire, gusts of manure, summer sweat beneath floral soap -- all falls away like an amputated limb. A light breeze giggles in the green canopy and trembles the heads of bright yellow wildflowers at her feet. The droning and trilling of insects fill a white noise symphony under the cracking, popping steps and scrambles of wild things too clever to be found by human eyes. A breaking branch squeals as it swings, splintering, from the tree it once belonged to, its whine like a door flapping on a rusty hinge.

Turn back the tape, and hear in the distorted voices secret messages. Subliminal messages slipped into your cake like a pubic hair, into your drink like menstrual blood, like a rune hidden under your bed. But they were never subliminal with her; they didn't need to be. (They meaning he.) They were all quite open with every intention. Did you read it, or did you just look at the words?

She tries to step lightly, but there's no such thing. Leaves and weeds crunch underfoot. If she would walk on the yellow flowers, maybe, maybe she could be closer to soundless, but she feels superstitious about it, even though she intends, she still believes, to leave. 

Even if she weren’t following the golden flowers like a breadcrumb trail away from the witch’s house, the deadfall and the underbrush choose her path for her. There are only so many places to walk on two legs in a thick forest, even if she weren’t being led. These are the same yellow flowers that they followed into the village; they should deliver her out, right? Though if she didn't know better, she would think they were taking her right into the belly of a beast.

Threading through the black corridors braced by slim, close-set trunks, unconsciously sifting for faces in their canopy, she doesn't realize that she's humming until there's someone to hear it.

Over a little hill, a close little clearing, and the forest shows her what she really came for. Seated on a windthrown alder, one leg hooked in a triangle over the other knee, an uncrowned king in ivory and azure, both colors two shades brighter than they are on her blanket. She knows because she has had so much occasion lately to notice his clothes on her bed. The yellow flowers thicken to a carpet at his feet, though there’s no more light there to nourish their growth, to explain the obeisant explosion of blooms. It’s like it's just where they want to grow.

He hums a little, a counter melody to the song that died in her throat at the sight of him, and the clarity of his voice impales her. He glances up from his sketch and his smile spreads as his pencil stills. Was sketching always waiting? 

“How did you --” Anger bursts in her, a stinging, blistering sore. She should run, except there are no other paths forward. She's jailed by the press of the forest. And so she charges him. Emotion falls out of her; she vents her fire. She'd know if it weren't anger, wouldn't she? “You _knew.”_

Mildness comes to him with ridiculous ease, as if on a drawstring. She believes it, even when she knows, she _knows,_ it’s impossible. “Dani? How could I know?” he asks, but the way he says it, it’s not a rhetorical defense. It’s a genuine question. “Dani, how could I possibly know?"

“Because you’ve…” she falters. She lifted this assumption on a scaffold of good reasons, she knows this, but against a direct challenge, all those details, those uncertain certainties, wobble and collapse. “You’ve had me drugged, you’ve been controlling me --”

Indulgence on his lips, in his eyes. “We haven't. But if you truly wish to go, I will drive you to the airport myself. You only had to ask.” His sad, small smile teases her. “We aren’t afraid of you. No one will believe you. Even you won’t believe you.”

Her lips part soundlessly. No child could trust that, and yet there is such dangerous magnetism here, the urge to believe it is _all right._

“The better question is how did _you_ know I would be waiting?” He cocks his head, looking her up and down and almost up, dilating on her midsection, her hips, flickering there before his eyes whip to her unsure face again. An involuntary jerk in her hips. Involuntary. Autonomic. Instinctual.

Her dress skirt keeps its warm, wet secret, but her breathing, she can't hide that. Her chest heaves against the sudden, vicious corseting by her nerve, and she stops a tremor in her left hand only by catching it and folding it in her right, tucking them together beneath her breastbone. She might be praying; her stricken look matches a woman at once as hopeful and hopeless as a penitent.

He inhales. “Look at you. No food, no water, not even a pocket knife. Dressed only for brambles to abuse you. There are better ways to die, Dani." Even his sarcasm is gentle. "Not that we would let that happen, but it could have been unpleasant. Is this really how someone runs away?”

Her face burns so hot, she should be able to pour it off, molten, into a forge. Her voice is barely a whisper of steam. “It was my last chance.”

A knowing look asks her to do better.

“I panicked.”

“You’ve had days to worry this out.”

“What do _you_ think I’m doing then?”

He puts the sketchpad away, folds his hands almost as a mirror of hers. He considers her fully. “Performing,” he tells her.

"How _could_ I know..." Dani appeals to him. It isn't the stalemate it should be, it's a checkmate, and she knows it, but she doesn't understand why. She falters. “Then you _made me_ come.”

The unintended joke in her phrasing is too blunt. He shakes his head with a resistant smile, refusing but underlining it.

"Do you not remember the river ritual, Dani?"

She does. Of course she does. She thought they were going to kill a child. She didn't know it was a play. She didn't know her genuine terror was in their script.

Dani swallows hard, his meaning becoming opaque, like a message written in invisible ink bleeding from a candle flame. 

She’s on script.

Her reluctance to believe seems to charm him. "You still have a choice. It’s important that you have a choice. Passage to and from Arlanda, Dani. Come closer. Look.” He digs into his pocket and retrieves two shining silver keys. They dangle from a simple chrome ring, door key and ignition key, and he joins with them a thick wedge of folded paper. It might be a plane ticket. He blinks at her, all expectant innocence, but surprised as she is by his offer, her throat thickens past answering. She has noticed the shadow of his cock, semi-erect, as it lies constrained under the fabric of that same pocket. 

She drags her eyes up to his. “You can’t expect me to believe that,” she says, but her voice is wilting, her pretense is wilting, and she wanders a step closer. 

“Not after all of this...These... _lies.”_ Her husked voice rasps even lower in her anger -- She would know if it wasn't anger, right? -- but her thighs brush each other under her skirt, so wet she's afraid he will notice even though the cut spins free of her hips. It is white fabric after all.

Patiently. “When have I _ever_ lied to you?”

Dry laugh, wet thighs, sweating alone with nowhere to run but back. If this is the belly of the beast, does that make the village the teeth?

More patiently. “When have I ever lied to _you?”_

Her scorn tastes bitter, like green tea steeped until it's cold. “What about when you said that the festival would seem _silly?”_

“Doesn’t it?” A broad grin fills his face, making apples of his cheeks. The grin doesn’t match his feathered voice, and the feathered voice doesn’t match his words’ cold, hard floor. “Be patient, my Queen. It _will_ seem very silly.”

Grin and voice and words. Crack them on the edge of the glazed green bowl, pour them into the mixture. With every stir, the brown honey syrup insinuates into her blood, as if by magic. She’s made sluggish and pliant, desperate and hopeless, ready and waiting.

“I never lied to you, Dani,” he assures her. “We will laugh about how little you’re laughing now.” It’s the cruelest way of promising it will get better, she thinks. Although maybe that’s not what he’s saying at all. Did you read it, or did you just look at the words?

Something has whispered at her since she realized it would not be a choice between him and Christian after all, a purple-tongued adder scoring her ear with its venom. She couldn’t quite bring herself to ask all these nights, when the only nightfall was the dusk gathered in his voice as he laid her down and didn’t touch her, and all these days, when he brought her childlike into places where they could be alone and didn’t take advantage. Maybe he’s right. Maybe she was _performing_ an escape. But this is something she genuinely needs to know. First.

“Why didn’t you burn with them?” Dani ventures. “Why...are you different?” He looks at her so strangely, she keeps putting the questions down in front of him, like cards in a tarot reading. “Is bringing me why they didn’t take you, too? Is that what saved you? Is that why --”

There are more cards in her hands that she can’t quite bear to reveal. _Is that what you feel for me? Is that why you haven't touched me since?_

Pelle’s smile flickers, an interrupted current. Slowly his voice drips onto her. “Dani. What makes you think I don’t burn?”

Her own voice is caught in an updraft too strong for its papery wings. “Pelle?”

Patience again. “You could never be an offering, and neither could I. You were all I was ever meant to find, Dani. Do you not see the difference between you and the others? Between us and them?”

She doesn't yet, not quite, but she edges the realization carefully, blinking back the stinging relief that springs into her eyes. “And if I go?”

Humor quirks him. They both know by now she’s going nowhere else but into his lap. She sees him decide he’ll answer though.

Veils of imperfect shadow groom him as he stands, walking slowly, slowly, but only so she has adequate time to realize.

_(you made me come.)_

What is he, coming toward her?

“I do burn, Dani,” he says, matter-of-factly. “And I rise. And I burn. And I bud. And I rise. And I burn. I am split and I am spilt, and I am buried. And I rise. Ever-living, ever-dying. The Fire Temple is important to my family, but I will never go inside. My name is not written for that lottery. I am always living and dying for them, but I cannot be sacrificed."

So near, his shadow robes her completely, but he is not lying. He burns, and that burning radiates, covering her with the red coal glow of the cookhouse hearth. Her memory flashes on the fire pit he showed them (her) after they arrived. _It's all our jobs to keep it burning._

“You said your parents burned.” Her eyes dilate as if to let more of him in. He isn’t touching her, but the _expectation_ is kissing her already.

“They did,” he nods. “They most certainly did. I was only a little boy then, and I scarcely understood. Even as they burned, and I smelled all their…” His features war between fascination and repugnance, “their _mortality,_ boiling off of them -- I felt their shock and their acceptance of the flames before I had a vocabulary to name either of those things. But I never had a chance to become lost. And now, neither will you.”

He knew that would spear her. He takes her face in his hands reverently, urging her closer to him. His lightest touch reverberates in her like a struck bell.

“They were the first -- the first offering. The very first, on which our family is built. I kept them from running when they wanted to go, and so I was honored with laurels for the first time. For my unclouded intuition. And later --”

She might have been struck. She staggers back a step, two, and he lets her. “What?”

He hesitates. “Last chance. Do you want to leave, my love? Or do you want to know? You can have anything but _both._ ”

 _My love._ No, she doesn't want to leave his love. She's not honestly sure that she can.

Dani steps back toward Pelle through a diagonal bar of sunlight, flaring a shadow over his face for a moment. She thinks, when her vision clears, that she should not be shocked that he is exactly what he appears to be, and when she thinks about it, she knows he never did lie. Another yellow wildflower, Dani inclines to him. “Now _you’re_ performing,” she says. He gave her the chance, but she really has no choice but to consent.

He lays the first kiss solemnly on her lips, a congregant’s carefully composed offering. No teeth, no tongue, no crush, no particular joy. _Yet._ Just a delicately broken seal. His scent is strange, pleasant, soft as his hair wisping her cheek, as pale as his eyes in direct daylight (not now, not as the pupils gloat, as the blue purples.) The scent is recognizably his, yet she detects something, an alien undertaste. Something is _changing,_ and Dani reads it off of him without needing words.

“I know this is all so strange for you. It won’t always be. And I _hope_ it isn’t strange to know...I love you, Dani. I really do.”

No, that part isn’t strange, though it’s still the hardest part to believe. Her fear chants so loud in her ears, and his voice only laps quietly at the edge of it. His kiss only lapped quietly at the edge of it.

“Not just the May Queen then?”

Charmed disapproval looks back at her. “That is like proposing I’m in love with your left hand and not your right.” He pauses. With a breath, his reverence falls from his shoulders, his ease slips down like a heavy cloak, and beneath, he pauses on the way to kiss her again. “You don’t have to love me, but…”

 _Doesn’t have to._ If he's not lying, then he's simply wrong. She shuts him up by throwing herself into the kiss she wanted from the moment she saw him. His mouth opens, and there is all of the passion she remembers, nothing delicate about it, although entirely devoted.

Keys chime against each other as he surrenders them to the forest floor. No one will ever need them again. Certainly she won’t. 

Ritual niceties are over. His teeth scrape down her throat into her bosom. Stitches give the way she gives: strain, break, open. These clothes are made special for the solstice, and now they will need to be made again. She drags his shirt free and off. She can’t feel how his pants fasten, clawing at them blindly from a kiss that has many segments but never stops and never breaks. Still, between them, he’s naked before she is, naked as a stone, but no stone burns like this. Pelle sucks breath, a brief phrase of revelation. He’s not a man, whatever he is, not _just_ a man, but the wonder of her will put him on his knees. 

“My Queen,” he exhales, unfastening the bodice. It sags around her waist, another cocoon to be sloughed off. Her body, its curves, its cushion for all his hard edges, its pink roundness, rises tight and warm from the discarded dress, a gentle spray of trapped petals falling with the fabric. Still more. No matter how well she washes, more of those petals appear, trapped in her bodice, in her panties, shreds caught under her nail beds. 

Her nipples want his teeth, and another wish is granted. Her moan harmonizes with the wind as she throws her head back, yielding to the wonderful provocation, as her sex electrifies. He sinks to his knees, tonguing a slow trail from the sweat beneath her pale, heavy breasts to her navel, gathering there perhaps only to give her a chance to think what comes next _Of course, of course, he is and you will let him, you will love it._ But even as her moan opens on his name, her fingers cradling his head, Dani’s hand snaps back. Surprise broken by alarm but then as quickly overwhelmed: his devouring eyes drag hers down as he looks up from his knees, his breath raking her gleaming thighs.

His eyes burn her down. She blinks, not knowing what she thought she felt, why she jerked away. A single brown leaf flutters from her hand, from the heavy brown fall of his hair. Dani threads her fingers again into its softness, soon discovering another under her fingers, a brighter russet this one, swishing it to the ground. Pelle breathes heavily, his eyes closing, as delicate, precise fingers comb more leaves free. Penetrating to his scalp through the thick, unruly waves is as frustrating as trying to dig to the bottom of a sand dune, but he must like the way it feels. 

One more groan rips from a darker cellar of his voice than she has ever heard, and he’s done waiting for her to understand. He nips at her hip bones, his thumbs teasing her entrance though her panties. Dani gasps, and she can’t help moving against him, feeding lust to his fingers, the heel of his palm. She forgets everything that isn’t being grazed by his breath. Another clear surge of fluid darkens her panties, her sex calling to his, and when he finally peels the fabric down, like leaves from a stem, she sighs into the scent of her own desire for him. Fingers first. When he withdraws two crooked fingers glossed in her arousal, he relishes their taste with closed eyes.

Dani laughs and so much tension bleeds out, from so deeply pursed within her, it’s almost an orgasm itself.

He cranes forward, teasing her outer labia with thumbs, forefingers, and he presses his tongue inside. She jolts and he wraps her hips against him hard, dragging her down, closer, wider, under. The moss and the wildflowers receive her softly, and he presses earnestly, humming her name, into mercilessness and laughter. Her fingers discover more loosened leaves under and alongside her, even as her sex opens for him in a way that doesn’t feel at all (human) _familiar._

It’s her clitoris under the tasting flicks of his tongue, but the ragged underside of her voice might well be trapped there, too, as he whips it free from her throat. Her fingers cinch and bunch in his hair again. The unmistakable crackle of leaves falls on her, as she realizes she’s teased yet more leaves from his hair. Too many. 

“Dani," he murmurs, the murmur pulling back the curtain on something deeper. "Dani, Dani." A growl wakes in his throat, a sound so unlike him, so unlike a _human,_ she’s shocked, thinking, no, there is something else here with them, there must be, stalking them while they lose themselves -- and of course there are many things around them, with them, watching them. They're in the woods. But the sound is Pelle. It comes again, and the vibration penetrates the walls of her sex, startling her out of her dreamy exultation, but into something --

_Deeper._

Dani’s breath catches in her throat, lifting herself on elbows to witness Pelle (what she has always called Pelle, but now seems insufficient) purring the deepest part of her unbearably taut. When he glances up, for one naked, hungry second, there are two white rose petals, wet almost to transparency in places, stuck to his beard, his cheek.

She doesn’t know what she says, if she says anything. More leaves come free from his hair, raining down between them. She combs them with her clawed fingers, even as her fear, _her fear,_ rides his persuasive tongue. 

She is holding him and he is holding her, but it isn’t anything like she thought it would be. 

_It’s better._

She lifts her hips against his mouth, kissing him back, accepting everything, everything that is him, even (especially) the fear.

The flash that peels her last, hardest scream from her, the burst of _fulfillment_ that vaults her, gasping, over an edge she never imagined, makes her brain and her body _change._ The change cascades after the feeling, and she can’t tell what she is, except she is _sublime._ Dimly, she senses Pelle, but she’s not sure she has ears or eyes or any organ to perceive him but skin. She thinks that is it, that maybe her skin is listening, but her skin is also stripping itself off her exalted bones, strewing like cherry blossoms in the wind.

Eventually, her eyes open, her actual eyes, the color of late-day sun in high, waving grass, and she discovers Pelle’s contented smile laid on her shoulder. She breathes in and out slowly; her lungs feel reassured. White petals surround her like a froth. She plucks one up, a supple ivory heart shape, and a sudden shudder ripples through her sex. She spreads her fingers through the petals, through the leaves. They turn to each other and laugh lightly. She sighs.

“We can be anything you want,” he tells her, gently. “We _are_ anything you want.”

She doesn’t imagine it. Canines lengthen, the silkiness of his face, not a face, a muzzle, protean in a way that pulls her taut, repulsed, but...not repulsed, and eyes that are still blue, receding, wild and clever. _No._ She shakes her head. She can’t. She puts a hand to his face, and he solidifies as she would expect. His very human kiss against her fingers douses her alarm.

“It’s okay. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

She’s not sure she believes that. She looks at him, knowing she is in love with a threshold, not a man, and there will always be a little fear crossing into his space, into his power. But also, most important: she loves it. She loves him.

She rakes her fingers through the leaves again and with a luxurious moan, he drives back down to her and bites her throat as if she whipped him to do it. Drowsiness pushes from the back of her eyes. Not a wholesome sleep, but the bidding of dormancy. Take me into the dark and wrap me in blankets, in fur, let me stop being so that my body can become something else. Metamorphosis wants me, and I can’t be awake for it.

“I would not mind though --” Pelle only parts from kissing her in moments long enough to speak, as though she is air and the words he would say are water, and he is forcing himself below the liquid surface to speak his mind. “Dani, I would not mind if you wanted to stay this way. I want to be a man with you, just for a while. We could live together, as long as humans live. And when it’s time for the Ättestupa, I will catch you.”

He would not _mind_ being a man. And she feels the evidence of that against her thigh, hot and hard and, she notices, almost purple. Of course his cock is unnaturally, naturally immense, and as he looks at her inquisitively, she giggles a little in spite of herself. The tip is shining with preejaculate, and Dani wonders briefly about babies, about pregnancy and the natural results of consummation. An intuition murmurs that spirals of DNA are not how they will go on. But her body is a curl of ribbon around his finger. 

Her anticipation makes his entrance ecstatic, but it's still harsh, jamming hard on the line between pleasure and pain. It might only be the former because she _wills_ it to be. When he moves inside her, she still winces though, and she would bleed with those first thrusts if she were the kind of woman who bled that way anymore.

“If you do not wish to be human, I can take that from you, too. I will peel it off you like your dress. I am male and you are female, but that can be anything, anything in this world, other than a man and a woman," he smiles. “Several times a day if you want. There’s so much you don’t know. And it helps.” He pauses, sensitively. “It helps with certain kinds of loss. Certain kinds of pain.”

She can't consider the full meaning of what he’s saying before their privacy is broken. From the way back to the village, she keys on the familiar crunch of feet in the leaves and the underbrush, only multiplied, multiplied, multiplied. There's no mistaking it. She looks back at him, and he nods, pulling her tight to his chest, comfortingly, and his straying kiss along the shell of her ear makes her shudder happily. In the subtle language of stress and sinew, the boundaries of their individual flesh becoming more flexible, she feels him look past her golden hair, though his kisses never slow or cease. He sees them gathering, so she feels them gathering, too.

For the first time, she understands that _my family_ and _our family_ will have a different texture than she could have predicted. Not the family they belong to. The family that belongs to them.

“You are a final sacrifice, of a kind. Died, reborn. You fulfill their contract.” His whisper fits her as fully as his cock. “Our contract. Another 90 years of prosperity lies on them,” he strokes her belly, its soft, healthy fat, and she feels him wanting to tear into it with the sharpest teeth he can make for himself. “as I lie with you.”

She puts her hand on his, guiding his strokes outside as they mirror his strokes inside. She wants to lose herself, but she needs to know. “Then what happens at 72? Do I die?"

His laugh shakes out of him like more leaves, as dark and jigsaw-shaped and sometimes golden. “In a way.”

“Won’t that break the contact?”

“No, shh. Not at all.” Such patience. Infuriating patience. But he plucks her red nipple as if in remonstration and she groans.

“How can it not?”

He massages her breast up and around, up and around. His manner suggests she should know, but she doesn't. She'd swear to it. 

“If you lie in the earth," he explains, riding inside her with terrible, exquisite deliberation, "you still lie with me. But you don't have to be alive for it. I will come to where you rest in the earth as earthworms and insects. Or I will come to you as Pelle, and I will dig into the earth with my own hands, because that is the only way to do these things. I will gather you into my arms, his arms, these arms, and I will break your corpse underneath me, underneath him. I will break your hips to dust with his, with these, with mine, and you will bear no child for it, but you will be loved. You will be _home._ That is the way it goes."

 _Ah._ Dani sighs. She guides his head back to her belly, lightly tracing his ear, his cheek, his beard. She feels his mouth open, his tongue and his lips, but she presses him in such a way he knows she wants his teeth. 

“Are you sure?” The naked hopefulness in his voice makes it impossible to think twice. She exhales and nods, though he can’t see, and presses his face harder, which he can certainly understand.

The first sharpness of true devourment is the only bad one, the surprise of it. The shock serves her better than dread; her body knows what to do, even when she can barely recognize what it has done. Shapelessness sweeps her as Pelle pries into her abdomen, her eyes lightly closed, placid, as though he had come to tell her stories in the twilight. There is blood on his face, but only a gout of red flowers in her abdomen. His breath across their petals makes her roar his name.

If this were a story, a simple bit of folklore, she thinks, she would look at the Green Man, the Faerie King, the Erl-King, whatever he is, Hårga -- that _is_ what he is, isn’t it? He is the spirit of this place -- she would ask him to turn into a man, as he himself desires. He would, of course, a gentleman and a wild spirit, be bound by the clearly-stated request of his prey. And clever woman, she would use that very mortal moment to break his heart, literally and metaphorically, with a wincing, teeth-baring shove of a hidden dagger, given to her in sunnier times by a safely dead parental figure, all but forgotten, or maybe the jagged stake of a broken tree limb that comes miraculously to her brave hand. He would dissolve in a cry, and his hold over her would disappear, and she would escape, over the threshold, into the bright daylight where well-adjusted young women belong.

She thinks of the birthday portrait, the picture she left, upside-down and backwards, tucked into the bed they prepared for her, her very refined _fuck you._ “Does everything you draw come true?” she asks.

“Everything I draw _is_ true.”

He is talking about her of course, and not the sketch. Drawing her was only part of drawing her, summoning her. This is why he has no fear of her, and, she sighs, why it is right that he shouldn’t.

“Be a man for me,” she says.

He smiles, eyes crinkling, lips twitching. Exactly the way he has been, with his boyish, slender frame, his height, his length warm iron again inside her. She opens her mouth against his and opens her thighs around his and lifts him inside her and he drives her into the ground. Their lovemaking rouses the trees and the grass. She sheds petals and when he traps them in his teeth, she cries out as if bitten. She _is_ bitten. Teeth marks appear on her waist, on her buttocks, on her inner thighs. 

Their family, all but forgotten, watch, quiet in grateful reverence, and maybe the sensible appreciation that these things they love can eat them, too. So few live to see this. The ninth day and the ninth night of the ninetieth year. They watch as he takes her and she takes him, and there is never any question of it being interrupted by a fairytale ending.

* * *

Every night, Pelle lies by Dani’s side, and she feels him subtly change in time with his dreams, the way she subtly changes when he touches her. What was once weird and frightening becomes thrilling becomes familiar and comforting. She is usually human herself; she doesn’t have to be, but Dani was human too long to enjoy losing the form. Except under his hand. Or his paw. Or his stalk or his feeler or his wing. But she also can’t imagine how she ever felt safe and happy lying next to someone locked into one set of bones. 

Every day, they go out, and live simply and in-between with the Hårgans, known by them for what they are and only loved, never dreaded. They covet her menstrual blood, which usually doesn’t come as actual human blood except during the full moon on Pelle’s tongue. Most often the sharpness in pelvis and the ache in her lower back promises a bizarre spill of rose petals, sometimes red leaves, or branches of bitter red berries, all teased out of her aching cunt by her husband with fascinated care. She will put these aside in cloth-lined baskets and leave them by the back door for Hårgan girls to collect. They use these tokens for everything, from tea to rouge to, of course, love potions. 

Dusk falls and then night. When it is dark, whether for hours or for the winter, it is their time together. No one troubles their doorstep without the sun behind them. But in the summer, they only belong to their family, seizing brief moments together in closets and the pantry, the laundry room, even the chicken coop. But it is preferred, by a tacit understanding, that they have each other in the light, in the open, in the fields, where their coupling always ensures a good harvest.

Pelle is always human in the village. In their little house, he might not be. Sometimes he likes to make her guess, as though she couldn’t tell. It’s a child’s game. Where is Pelle? Is he the fox at the windowsill? Is he the raven on the roof? “Be a man for me,” she says, and the wolf at her feet drags himself into a terrifying transformation. Dani at thirty, at forty, at fifty, at sixty, at seventy-one, will only hum and turn over, undisturbed, waiting to feel his chest pressed against her back, his erection teasing her backside. He drags her onto her knees and drives inside her from behind with all the ferocity of his former shape, his fingers and his scrotum beating the orgasm out of her. Wolf fangs and wolf claws linger until she is satisfied, sinking deep and taking her blood in dripping mouthfuls of red poppy petals. They sleep on a bed covered in the gore of crushed flowers.

Youth never leaves them, although they play with aging sometimes. Dani is drawn to it most, as naturally as she is drawn to look over the edge of a cliff. Pelle only sees it as another kind of change, and he finds it interesting. He massages her loosened skin and pets her greying head, her hair so much more unruly and less fine, but its whiteness also beautiful, fundamental, pure. A young man kisses an old woman. A young fox delves into a young woman’s sex. A young man and a young woman hold hands and walk along the river, lighting the sunset gloom with their happiness, just as they have been doing for decades.

“I will not see you gone,” he says to her on that inevitable day, dogged at her side, as two fine strong young men carry her flower-bedecked throne up the blue-veined cliffs, Dani caped in grey and blue. “Not you --”

Her smile stops his selfish voice. He steps back, taking her in, and breathes. They are grey now, as the family expects. But the family knows that is entirely for their benefit, too. White and blue-robed Hårgans stand by the edge, waiting for Dani. A Father and a Mother, they have never known a day in their lives when she didn’t exist, and now they are in their Fall.

“Be a man for me,” she whispers.

He shakes his head, and leaves fall from him, eyes wet, voice husking. "I want you with me."

"You burn. You bud. We all die.”

In all their years and all his forms, he has never been furious, but he is now. He’s been ratcheting up to this for months, if not years, the unholy affekt of attachment to this still somewhat-human sacrifice. Dani is touched that he would become unnatural with her, for her. But she only needs one lifetime to understand it _is_ wrong.

“Pelle.” Her eyes are pink as she reaches up to brush his grey beard, to touch her nose to his, before pressing a soft kiss against the angry, miserable line of his mouth. “My last request."

"Not your last. Never your last."

Dani smiles, granting him that. “I’ll be reborn somehow. Maybe you will find me again. That’s how it’s supposed to be.”

He’s not letting go. "We can fly from here. I will hollow our bones and give us feathers for fur. We may go on and on in this flesh, just this once."

“What is once without ending?”

“Let’s _find out.”_

Dani looks up at him, so tempted. But she can’t betray him by giving into him now. 

At the base of the cliff, the family is waiting, a scatter of grim, uplifted faces. She knows them so well; she's seen three generations now, and there are, of course, the handful who must always remind her of Christian and Mark. 

She nods down at them, still their Queen. "That would fail them though,” she observes. “Wouldn't it?"

One merciful stroke, and Dani beheaded his misbegotten hope. Pelle flashes dark. First angry, and now another unholy affekt shows on him. In all these decades, she has never before seen him ashamed.

Her heart is breaking. Changing helps with certain kinds of pain, she knows, but not this. She doesn’t want to go, but she wants to leave him this way even less. “Pelle --”

As if in an impulse, he pushes youth back onto her in a kiss. Dani gasps, the tone of her voice renewing its sap even as she does, and it feels like midday sunlight spreading over her skin from the inside. When she looks up at him, her eyes are clearer inside and out. The outcry of the Hårgans waiting nearest rings at them. They know this happens, but they so rarely _see_ it. Dani grins, wry and indulgent. “You shouldn’t have.”

Pelle’s young again, too, naturally. Still a little angry, though he’s trying to be better than that. "Will you at least fall with me?" he asks, kindly, courtly, stroking her cheek.

"Of course.” Relief. Being in his arms will make a difference; maybe most of all for him. With a grateful nod, she consents.

“Good.” Anger drains from him. He has made a peace inside himself. Only gentleness as he draws her up into a kiss. He peers down at the rock below, looks back at Dani. Her hand fits in his, and she remembers a very long time ago when he took it, stroked it carefully, and asked her if Christian, of all people, if Christian felt like home.

The restraint he showed then, only to ask her to forget their obligations now. Her heartache is a further fall than they contemplate. Yes wants onto her lips, but she knows better. He knows better. She has to be strong for both of them.

"You _will_ find me again."

His smile crinkles the corners of his eyes, but doesn't quite reach inside. "Hold on to me,” he directs her, the color let out of his voice.

Nodding, she steps with him to the edge. Alarm ripples below already; it's not permitted for two to jump at once. It’s too dangerous, too easy to miss the rock. And who are they, the young couple? Where is Grandmother Dani? 

Ah, but all the stories _are_ true. 

The man opens his arms around the woman. They look down together; they kiss; they plummet.

Wait.

The rock’s face has worn to a natural, pitted white plane under sun and storms for hundreds of years, and in that span, it has absorbed the velocity, bone, and blood of so many Hårgan living as they become Hårgan dead. Pelle could name every one. But this time, there is no velocity, no shattering, no sickening splash. Instead, a drift of red leaves and red petals whispers onto the stone, gently, slowly, draping a different, stark crimson where their devout family expected a gesture of blood. 

They never found bodies because there were never bodies to find. Ah, but lost, almost hidden among petals and leaves, one red feather drowses on the gritty, pale face of the rock.

**Author's Note:**

> This doesn’t draw on any specific Scandinavian lore. There are many, many supernatural creatures in Norse myth that this almost touches, but I made it up.
> 
> “Is it more tragic or less tragic that Heracles never really had a choice?” is a question harvested from the English class (love English classes in horror films, always the Greek chorus no one hears) in Hereditary.
> 
> This was originally posted as part of my impressive Dani/Pelle porn oeuvre in July 2020. I had to stop writing so I could start writing other stuff, which everyone was lovely about and encouraging and I appreciated it. Unclouded and Öde were unfinished and I couldn't leave them that way; I just wasn't happy with Newblood anymore and had ideas about retooling it into something else, not fanfic. [shifty eyes] I took Folksaga and Maskerad down, too, because...I'm a Scorpio and that's how we do? I don't know. But once done, I never stopped feeling bad about it. Maybe it doesn't even matter. But maybe it does. So here's Folksaga and Maskerad again and I hope someone still likes them every once in a while. And now I disappear again though I still love everybody. Thanks. Adjö. <3<3<3


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